Judge for Yourself: Jewel of Medina in U.S. Bookstores

The controversy surrounding Sherry Jones's The Jewel of Medina, a novel in which the youngest wife of the Muslim prophet Muhammad tells the story of their marriage from her perspective, intensified last week, after an attempt to firebomb the book's British publisher created momentary uncertainty about whether that edition would go forward (it will) and raised security concerns at the offices of Beaufort Books, the novel's American publisher. Ultimately, Beaufort—which picked up the book after Random House, citing its own security concerns, dropped it—decided to move the publication date up so that it would be available in bookstores starting today. "There's a lot of talk about what is and isn't in the book by people who haven't read it," Jones explained as we chatted in a café near Beaufort's Manhattan offices Friday afternoon. "Until people read it, the dialogue can't move on. The discussion cannot progress."

When American forces invaded Afghanistan seven years ago, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, as supporters declared that the intervention would end the repression of women under the Taliban's interpretations of Islamic doctrine, Jones wanted to learn more. She read the first two books she could find on women and Islam—Geraldine Brooks's Nine Parts of Desire and Jan Goodwin's Price of Honor—both of which mentioned the story of A'isha. "I was just fascinated by her tale," Jones recalled. "I was drawn to her immediately; I felt empathy and compassion for her." She began writing the novel that became The Jewel of Medina in an effort to better understand A'isha: "I asked myself, how does a young girl whose life is completely controlled by men transform into the leader and warrior and scholar that she became? So I gave her obstacles and temptations in the course of imagining how she would grow."

The problem (as we see it) stems from the flagrant mischaracterization of the novel by Islamic studies professor Denise Spellberg, whom Ballantine Books had approached hoping for a blurb, as "soft core pornography" and anti-Muslim propaganda; Spellberg's zealous efforts to alert Muslims to the book's impending publication were particularly effective in giving the public a distorted impression of its contents. And we do mean distorted: Now that we've read the novel for ourselves, and seen precisely two paragraphs that might be construed as sexually explicit (and that's being extremely generous to one of them), Jones deserves a public apology from Spellberg for her public misrepresentations. (Jones has asked Spellberg to recant; she told us Friday that repeated efforts to contact her detractor have met with silence.)

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